


Even in the spirit of truth

by pelican_in_its_piety



Series: Entirely Beloved [2]
Category: Wolf Hall Series - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Anachronistic Tallis, Emotionally Significant Renovations, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:41:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25594459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelican_in_its_piety/pseuds/pelican_in_its_piety
Summary: He longs for Stepney and Austin Friars, for his garden Arcadia. He longs for the beginning of this story, when he was not a courtier and Thomas was thinner, less expansive, and less confident. But soon he is to be nothing at all. Everything comes to an end here; from now on there are only memories. In some very real sense Rafe’s life is over, and everything after this, all his middle and old age, all his danger and prosperity, are the epilogue to his life with Thomas.
Relationships: Thomas Cromwell/Rafe Sadler, Thomas Cromwell/Rafe Sadler/Helen
Series: Entirely Beloved [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1855096
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Even in the spirit of truth

And so we have come to the end. There are no more howevers. The imp under his chair has fled.

Rafe makes it home before the soldiers arrive. He goes upstairs to Cromwell’s study: untouched. There are no papers lying around. How long before he was taken did he know? The box is in the drawer where he said it would be. In a sickening instant before he opens it, Rafe knows what will be inside.

The turquoise is lying there next to Liz’s prayer book. Forbidden objects, now, contaminated with the miasma of a treasonous man. If Rafe is wise, he will lock them right back where they found him. But look: the ring has been resized to fit him. It would never have fit on Cromwell’s first finger like this. He knew. How long does it take a goldsmith to alter a ring? That’s how many days warning he had, when he knew the tide was irrevocably against him, when he was caught in the downward suck of a whirlpool.

Rafe puts on the ring. He will keep the lyke wake as well as he is able, but he thinks he had better leave London, quickly. Go where it will inconvenience Henry to track him down. Nowhere is totally safe, but without his master, Henry might not be bothered.

And so he and Helen go north to Launde while Call-Me is still betraying his master; long before the inevitable execution. He remembers Wolsey’s last journey as much through his master’s anguished retellings as his own memories. He himself was at the edges of the story: coming to fetch Thomas home from the cardinal’s in better days, hunting for him while Liz died, meeting him at the door when he returned from Esher. He was there when George Cavendish described Wolsey’s death, but he was watching Thomas’ reactions: disgust, pity, and grudging admiration for the gentleman usher, blotted out by unmediated grief. It reminded him of those chess games in quarantine after Liz’s death: the grief covering everything else, transubstantiating it.

He and Helen lie in their unaired bed at Launde Abbey, in the middle of haphazard and suddenly-halted builders’ works. He thinks how Thomas looked in their bed the morning after Henry reconciled with Mary: the first time he and Helen knew him. He slept softly, Helen’s left breast in his big hand. Rafe wondered how long it had been since someone saw him like this – there had been women since Liz, and His Majesty too, if he was not wrong, but did Thomas sleep so peacefully beside any of them?

He supposes he should have felt guilty for having lain with the man whose household raised him, but he doesn’t. Thomas was so many men over his lifetime, and at least three while Rafe knew him – the statesman was hardened by loss even while he looked enriched by fortune, and there was very little of the father left in him just as there is very little of the son in Rafe anymore. And he was so alone. When he, Thomas, was most magnificent, he was loneliest, most exhausted, most dogged and haunted. But that morning in their bed, he was unguarded.

And again, when he staggered out of the nun Dorothea’s cell on the verge of tears or vomiting. They finished negotiations with the abbess and rode back to their lodgings, and as Rafe was washing himself before bed Thomas knocked on his door.

Rafe supposes Thomas is to him as the cardinal was to Thomas, though he doubts the cardinal ever asked Thomas to tup him. There was enough love between them, though, that even now the accusation of unfaithfulness can undo Thomas. And he comes to him, Rafe, the way he needs, and it is perfect. Rafe sucks him off, kneeling for him, running his hands up and down Thomas’s powerful thighs and arse, resting his cheek on his thigh when Thomas has finished. Thomas’ desperate grasping at his hair turns into a caress; he slips his hand from his hair to his cheek, thumb finding the hollow by Rafe’s eye. Then he pulls Rafe to his feet and pulls him to the bed.

“I wonder if this is how Mary Boleyn’s husband feels, being where the king has gone first,” he says, and Thomas, spread out under him, one leg hooked around Rafe’s back, gripping Rafe’s forearms where he braces himself on the bed, laughs. The laugh turns into a choked gasp as he moves just right around Rafe’s cock.

On the morning Thomas dies, Rafe wakes early and walks around the garden. He longs for Stepney and Austin Friars, for his garden Arcadia. He longs for the beginning of this story, when he was not a courtier and Thomas was thinner, less expansive, and less confident. But soon he is to be nothing at all. Everything comes to an end here; from now on there are only memories. In some very real sense Rafe’s life is over, and everything after this, all his middle and old age, all his danger and prosperity, are the epilogue to his life with Thomas. Who now will tell inside jokes that reek of long affection, or banter with the cooks, or dream of future houses and their furnishings with him? Their little cabal of clerks and courtiers is broken, the best and truest parts of his home are irretrievably gone. He supposes this is how Thomas felt when Wolsey died, and yet he went on to flourish. Or did he: more narrow and avaricious year by year, never quite sure what he was striving for, only knowing that it would be death to relent? But he didn’t relent, and now he is dead anyways. To save you from grief, God cuts out your heart of flesh and gives you a heart of stone.

Later still, Rafe wonders whether Thomas will speak to him the way the cardinal spoke to Thomas: at his desk when he is hashing over a problem, or jolting on dreary roads. Perhaps he will give him advice on the renovations. He supposes Thomas and the cardinal must be taking a glass of Rhenish together; they must be eating cherries in March and lettuce in December. But he is lonely for his master as if he were at court and Thomas out on the roads and he could not send letters. It seems obscene to him that Thomas should not watch Helen grow big with child again; that he should not lie between her thighs and lick her cunt when she is too big to fuck. It is obscene that Thomas should not peel an orange, studded spicy with cloves, on Twelfth Night; that he should not sit in the garden with them on warm summer evenings, or fuss over builders.

Under his many obstructions and obfuscations, Thomas was a gospeller, like Helen. Rafe knows this. He has no particular thoughts on religious questions, which is just as well, because you can never predict what Henry wants you to think. But for Helen’s sake, he does not think Thomas is in purgatory. And if he was, he would reform the administration of the place and double its income every two years he was there. Perhaps he would dissolve it and take the revenues for the cardinal.

_If ye love me,  
keep my commandments,  
and I will pray the Father,  
and he shall give you another comforter,  
that he may 'bide with you forever,  
e'en the spirit of truth._

Even in the spirit of truth. Not quite the truth, but its spirit. No one was more adept at teasing out the spirit of the truth than Thomas. He would talk to it saying, perhaps you could be persuaded to mean these things as well. The spirit of truth is grand and all-encompassing; it is as sharp and flexible as a boning knife, as sudden as the _estoc_ you slip between an assailant’s ribs.

And who will be the comforter? And who will bide with us now, in the ruins of this man’s love, in the shell of the house he was remaking like he remade everything except, in the end, himself?


End file.
